Red Thread(s)

What goes on here? What is the nature of this writing, this project? One thing is written - transcribed, possibly - and posted. Lateral leaps, asides, digressions and repetitions. Bald statements. Ambiguities. One post effaces the other.
The duplicitous top sheet wch disguises the fact that the pages beneath are blank.
A sort of hum, or a murmur, in the background.


"There should be a writing of non-writing. Someday it will come. A brief writing, without grammar, a writing of words alone. Words without supporting grammar. Lost. Written, there. And immediately left behind."
-- Marguerite Duras

There's a building with a clock face, or a device in the form of a face of a clock. Possibly a clock whose hands are frozen in place, in this place, in failing light; the fading light points out this particular detail.
There are voices, of sorts, a kind of murmur in the distance. Perhaps it's water in the pipes. Perhaps it's the train, running once again. It has been a long time, and I have never heard well, even in the best of times.

A small piece of paper
can only absorb
so much water - or ink.
Strange to use the word
"saturated"
for so small a limit.

§

Walking down a side street this morning, you come across an arm. Most of one, that is: the hand is intact, and there’s a portion above the wrist, to the elbow. Strange that there is no blood, or not much. The ground is broken and stained, as are most surfaces. You don’t think much about it, the stains, the mold, the dust and fragments.
You heard explosions last night; you’ve almost become used to them. They wake you up sometimes, but your heart quiets itself and you go back to sleep, most of the time.
Sometimes you wake for no reason.

§

It’s a consequence of the situation, not sleeping much, that things take on a dreamy, unreal quality, even in the middle of the day. Sleeplessness becomes the norm, so that given a span of time and relative quiet, unrest asserts itself, rises up out of the silence.
You think of how a piece of cloth can only absorb so much blood. How that sounds like a metaphor. It’s not as abstract as water. How it is. Just the way it is.

16.X.06

Carceraglio has published an interview with Alain Badiou. You should read it.
Infinite Thought provides some interesting thoughts on adolescence. Spurious revisits Kafka's "merciful surplus of strength." These things are good, enlivening to me.
Here, or way from here, boring life-work continues: I have been re-arranging my apartment and despairing over the reams of accumulated paper. It's amazing how light and dust corrode text -- a film of dust over everything. I wipe away a surface, and the next day, I do it again. It's a dry and grating tide.

Speaking of watery diasters, had the recent good fortune of hearing Mary Burger read, one part of the reading involving watery disasters. Such a consolation to leave a reading feeling more energetic, more hopeful than before. Like writing, or literature, might just be possible.... Rather than being thankful one doesn't have handgun at home. I'm reading her book Sonny now, and this I'd like to share:

"What this boy liked best about representation was the way it consoled him for being alive.

What this boy liked best about being alive was the way it consoled him for the immateriality of representation.
[...]

In the aftermath we see a clean trajectory, a feat that we can easily repeat. Simple, like a gun. A bullet through a barrel through a head.

Of course we don't have many relics from that fisrt time -- a little twisted rebar from the tower. We know we'll never find the hull resting on the ocean floor.

That's why the picture is significant."

Most of her books can be obtained through Small Press Distribution.

Yesterday's attempt to clear space from one table surface (in a perfect world, perfectly suited and situated for work; in mine, inefficient storage space) - to make room for a new typewriter - has yielded more work. A sorting of papers "inspired" me to undo several boxes of papers, articles, letters, notebooks, clippings, materials for collage, and the like. My back is sore and I'm exhausted & battling with a sense of futility; there is a good six month's work of worrying at my scrawl, trying to decipher it, deciding of it's worthwhile, then where to put it -- sorting the shards into usable, small pieces; morpheme-like bits that need a little work and that, with the right addition might cohere into something; and lines and drafts that need what?-- to be recomposited into another notebook, rendered into a more manageable form? To be added to the other notebooks? That's only the "creative" work; articles and critical pieces need to be sorted for eventual placement in a file cabinet (wch needs to be purchased); letters and such need to be sorted and boxed, and the like. I've done this before, more or less, wch is how most of these things got into five file boxes to begin with; the downside of this is that the re-sorting disrupts whatever tentative mental or temporal attachments have been previously been made. Upside is that much has made its way into the recycling bin already, and while the sheer amount of unreadable or plain terrible writing is daunting, a few bits caught my eye & showed some hope. I'll make mournful crow sounds as I perch on my midden, gleaning the shiny bits. And investment in a future I'm not sure I desire. I will dream of fire tonight. (More likely, a flood. Sodden-ness and rot, watery disaster).